Hi,

If you have a Linux machine you can try ddrescuehttps://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ … cue_manual.html, I personally haven't tried it with floppy disks, only with failing HDDs but it is supposed to work with floppies as well.

It should be available for all major Linux distributions in their package managers/repositories.

As this program has a lot of options I recommend reading the whole manual before using it for the best results.

VGACopy lets you do 99 retries on a sector

Thanks for the replies. I dont have a linux set up at the moment so I will try VGAcopy.

I've been pretty successful with ImageDisk, sometimes recovering disks that others had given up on that more dedicated recovery software had deemed "unrecoverable".

IMD was designed to be able to read/write anything the PC floppy system can handle at the hardware level. It does not use BIOS, access the FDC directly, and can maniupulate the FDC in ways the PC was never designed to.

But... be warned that this is NOT an "automatic" process. Be prepared to do some non-standard things if needed (seek to track from either side, Tweak speed up/down, slightly misallign etc.) ... and you may not get it all in one try.

IMD records disk image in it's own format which includes information about track format, which sectors were read with errors and more.

Using IMDU (IMageDiskUtiity) you can assemble results from many read attempts into a single complete (at at least as complete as you can get) "final" image which you can then write back to a fresh diskette, or convert to a typical "raw binary" disk image which is accepted by many other tools.

Also be aware that since IMD access the FDC directly as in somewhat non-standard/time sensitive ways... it needs to run under DOS (no OS protections or background activity). If you don't have a DOS system, I do provide a bootable image so you can run IMD on any PC (supporting floppies obviously) without needing a DOS usable hard-drive.

I should also mention:

Make certain the drive heads are SPOTLESS*, although it is possible for a disk to fail due to stray magnetic fields near it, a far more common cause is the magnetic coating flaking off the underlying disc (You can sometimes see this as concentric "rings" visible on the actual media.

If this is happening, just reading the disk can further damage it, and if the drive heads have any "grime" on them (which they do tend to collect from other disks), that damage is pretty much guaranteed and will be much worse.

For the same reason you want to try and minimize your attempts to read it.

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If it's a 5.25" 360k disk... it may read better on a 1.2m drive (or if you are trying to read it on a 1.2, might do better on 360).

This is because 80-track 1.2m drives have thinner heads than 40-track 360k drives. The 1.2m drive only sees a portion of a 360k track, and if that track has been degraded, a smaller portion might appear less damaged. This is where slight misalignment can help - you can cause the drive to read it's "strip" closer to either edge.

If you're trying to read 360 on 1.2, using a 360 which "sees" the full track width can help when tracks begin to degrade.

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And of course different drives of the same type might do better on some degraded disks (just make sure any drive you use has spotless heads*). Back in the day when I did a lot of this stuff ... I had a stash of "recovery drives" I had found to be better.

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* For best head cleaning, I recommend disassembling the drive(s) and manually clean the head surfaces with alcohol and soft lint-free pads.

But... most people don't want to be bothered with this.. if you don't know drives you can cause damage, and some drives you have to losen head alignment to raise them enough... so they use a "cleaning disk".

If you go this route, make sure you have a good cleaning disk, and the trick is "how to use it". Systems/OSs don't tend to have good ways to make the drives spin and seek around, Most end up just inserting the cleaning disk, and trying to access.. This will typically only seek to track0 and stay near there, which means most of the cleaning surface is unused.

ImageDisk has a "clean heads" function which will "scrub" the heads back and forth along the full width of a spinning cleaning disk. This does a MUCH better job than "trying to list the directory".

DaveDDS wrote on 2026-05-11, 18:30:

I've been pretty successful with ImageDisk, sometimes recovering disks that others had given up on that more dedicated recovery software had deemed "unrecoverable".

I've managed to recover many a bad disk with your ImageDisk program, so wanted to say thanks for making it 😀
The IMD format's ability to log bad sectors has been handy too, as it allows multiple reads on different computers/drives to be merged into one good image.

astonsmith wrote on Yesterday, 14:25:

I've managed to recover many a bad disk with your ImageDisk program, so wanted to say thanks for making it 😀 ...

You're welcome ... Always good to hear when someone finds it useful.

Kinda funny ... I wasn't even thinking about "recovery" when I wrote ImakeDisk. As part of my work with classic systems, I wanted to create something that could archive and restore ANY disk that the PC hardware could access. In other words, a way to preserve ancient disk formats no longer supported anywhere common.

Hence IMD goes out of it's way to make the image file "non format dependent", literally just recording what it was able to "see" at the lowerst level on the disk. ... ancient disks for ancient systems do tend to have more degradation then newer stuff, so I recorded whatever errors I could identity and incorporated a means of combining multiple images into one "final" one.

Because of all that, IMD turned out to be a pretty good recovery tool as well (for any system with hardware compatible disks) - I've ended up using it for this almost as much a for classic preservation.